I've read that in real trucks, air brakes are often used sparingly, since 1) stopping a heavy load at speed requires a massive dissipation of energy and puts a lot of stress on friction brakes and 2) you can deplete the reserve of compressed air (thus having to wait for the tanks to refill).

So, when going downhill, it's common to use the retarder and/or exhaust ("jake") brakes to reduce (or maintain) the speed of the vehicle. I believe the retarder uses the transmission, while the jake brake controls valve timing so the engine itself acts as a compressor to dissipate energy.

I believe in "auto retarder" mode (the default) ETS2 engages the retarder for you when you release the accelerator. But I'm not sure about that?

The latest patch added "air brake simulation" which allows the air reserves to be depleted as they would in a real truck. I want to make all this stuff as simulator-y as possible, which means I need to understand what I'm doing. So that leaves me questions:

1) When do I use the retarder versus the jake brake versus the air brake? For what reasons would I prefer one over the other? Should they all be used in combination?

2) I'm completely out of control points on my G27. I managed to fit retarder increase / decrease onto the wheel, but there's nowhere to put the jake brake. I'm wondering if a flight control throttle should be added to the mix - has anybody used this with the game?

Air brakes tend to be the only brakes CMVs have. If you're going downhill for a long time, that would be when you avoid your brakes as much as reasonably possible, and use other forms of slowing the truck (downshifting to a limited extent, but more engine/exhaust braking)

I don't know how detailed the game is, but when you're coming into communities, there will be signs detailing whether or not engine/exhaust/jake/compression braking is allowed. Sometimes it's allowed during certain hours (ie, daytime). Otherwise it's fair game, although common sense still applies (ie if you're taking a legal shortcut through a residential area due to traffic or whatever, it might not be the most polite thing to do.)

They can be turned on in different ways. Sometimes a lever, and it's only engaged when you hold the lever, other times a switch with either high/off/low settings, or degrees of retardation (a Volvo I drove had a lever with like three or four settings, with the strongest setting only manually engaged but DAMN it was nice :D).

If I'm in a truck with engine braking, I prefer to leave it engaged in if I'm not on a highway. With stop signs, people turning, etc, there's just a lot more desire to slow down. On the highway it's generally off so I don't slow down too much. So yes- use both in combination if the game lets it work out okay.

Air brakes tend to be the only brakes CMVs have. If you're going downhill for a long time, that would be when you avoid your brakes as much as reasonably possible, and use other forms of slowing the truck (downshifting to a limited extent, but more engine/exhaust braking)

I don't know how detailed the game is, but when you're coming into communities, there will be signs detailing whether or not engine/exhaust/jake/compression braking is allowed. Sometimes it's allowed during certain hours (ie, daytime). Otherwise it's fair game, although common sense still applies (ie if you're taking a legal shortcut through a residential area due to traffic or whatever, it might not be the most polite thing to do.)

They can be turned on in different ways. Sometimes a lever, and it's only engaged when you hold the lever, other times a switch with either high/off/low settings, or degrees of retardation (a Volvo I drove had a lever with like three or four settings, with the strongest setting only manually engaged but DAMN it was nice :D).

If I'm in a truck with engine braking, I prefer to leave it engaged in if I'm not on a highway. With stop signs, people turning, etc, there's just a lot more desire to slow down. On the highway it's generally off so I don't slow down too much. So yes- use both in combination if the game lets it work out okay. :)

This is very helpful!

So in the game, the retarder (which is only available with "R" designated transmissions) has several "steps" and you cycle through them with a keypress. At least in the trucks I've driven in ETS2 (Volvo FH, MAN TGX, Scania R) the retarder in the virtual cabin is a lever on the steering column. I don't know whether this is accurate to how it really is in those trucks but based on the detail in ETS2 I'd suspect so.

The different trucks have different numbers of steps for the retarder. I think the Volvo is the highest with five. So to become fully retarded I have to hit the retarder increase button four times, then to completely disengage it I hit the decrease button four times. I have these mapped to buttons on my G27. I feel like something like a throttle from a flight stick would be a better representation of this than hitting buttons but I 1) don't have one and 2) don't think the retarder can be mapped to an analogue axis.

I've gotten pretty decent just using the retarder in combination with the air brakes and I've never encountered low air pressure yet (but I couldn't tell you whether that simulation is super accurate). I haven't been using the engine brake but maybe I should map it to spacebar? The game does not have signage on when you're allowed to use it for noise reasons.

First time in the thread - I picked this up on the recent Steam sale after watching a DayZ streamer put a lot of time into ETS2. I'm having a silly amount of fun figuring things out (not going full simulation, but also not going fully automated), and making plans for my trucking empire.

No mods yet, and no DLC - the vanilla mod is keeping me entertained so far. Are there any user-experience mods I should think about? Better graphics, scenery, stuff like that? I'm not looking for anything that changes the gameplay yet, I guess.

I read back a few pages and saw people mentioning Photo Mode; I didn't realize there was a separate mode implemented. I was trying not to crash while taking screenshots (read: not really taking screenshots ), but now I'm going to log in and check out Photo Mode. I'm still driving my first truck (Scania), so maybe I can document the building of my empire.

This is a single 200 MB self extracting .exe file. All you have to do is run it and all the info is dumped into the appropriate location (there's an uninstaller included too). When installed you'll have 14 separate mods you can toggle on or off individually at your discretion. The programmer and fellow contributors' home base is the Official SCS Forum, so I'd gather that it's tacitly endorsed by SCS at best and not game-breaking at least.

Here's the mods you'll be able to toggle (on the opening Profile select screen hit the Edit button).

Thanks Aaron! I appreciate the cut and paste - once a thread hits a long enough page count, I despair of finding the right information in any sort of timely fashion

I don't think I'll enable everything in the pack (realistic economy, fuel prices, tonnage...maybe not vehicle physics), but the audio/visual enhancements and game fixes are exactly what I was hoping for.

Off to download and install - and then I should probably test it out for a couple deliveries

From what I understand, the current units are considerably smaller than the older dev kits. So it stands to reason that they could possibly trim it down further, but from reading impressions of the device itself, it doesn't feel too bad.

I finally made some time to play ETS2 with the Oculus Rift. It's pretty clear that this is going to be an amazing experience, and quite likely the best way to play the finest long-distance driving simulator of the modern era, or any other "cockpit sim" for that matter.

More than anything else I've tried in the Rift, ETS highlights the extremes that characterize the current Rift developer kit. The head-tracking is brilliant, allowing proper "head checks" when making turns, letting you literally look down at the dash, and (in my case at least), cackle maniacally at the astonishing prettiness of Polish wind farms gliding past the driver's side window. Incidentally, the stereoscopy and world scale work well enough that those turbines now look as big as they do beautiful.

Sadly, this wonderful game experience is not fully playable on the developer kit. The resolution is so low that the dashboard instruments are unreadable, as is the menu system (though removing the Rift between runs is a fine work around for the menu problem). The "screen-door effect" is also particularly distracting in ETS2, probably just because the game goes by at a relaxed pace, and because it uses "Oh! How pretty!" as a core gameplay mechanic.

If Oculus squeeze enough pixels into the production Rift hardware, playing ETS2 without one is going to be like playing flight-sims with a keyboard.